more.

Daniel Johnston wants you to know that True Love Will Find You in the End. Count on a tortured, optimistic manic depressive to assure us of this. Or my parents.

That's unfair. My parents are awesome, and when my (ex)boyfriend announced last week he's leaving town for a 2-year bike trip and doesn't see the point in continuing even a friendship, they were right to say sorry you fell for a self-serving jerk and you'll find someone fantastic some day.

Except - the consolation in itself is frustrating. Embedded is the belief that finding someone fantastic is the point. Is it? Does it have to be? Does everyone assume we're all looking out for that special someone who won't screw us over because they just have to get out of Gainesville? Er, uh. Anyway.

Or are we all? I'd be the first to admit actual love would be a lovely thing to find. There must be few who don't like it, although I'm sure they exist. Everybody likes love. But is eventually having someone else the Point?

I'd just like to say I think there's more. Getting married is easy; you can always find someone else who craves security too. Having babies is wonderful, but that's more biology's accomplishment than ours. If everyone's only goal was to procreate, the world would come to a grinding halt. Someone has to keep the world moving. There's meaning in love and reproduction, but there's meaning all around us. Life is full of possibility. (Painfully so for a woman born after the feminist movement, who enjoys all its benefits but fought for none of them and has no idea what to do with the freedom bestowed on her.)

I could do any of myriad meaningful things with my one wild precious life. Many of which would benefit others far more than one dude would benefit from my devotion. The petty part of me whimpers this is still lonely. But we aren't lonely the first two, three decades of life we don't have a Special Friend. We don't have to be lonely now just because the world says it's time to be. There is so much more. There are so many ways to give, to more people than that one, in quite possibly more meaningful ways.